These were tuned by a WIZARD! – Noble Audio FoKus Mystique

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “These were tuned by a WIZARD! – Noble Audio FoKus Mystique”.
What have I told you, your headphones could be tuned by a wizard. No, that does nothing for you. The good folks, over at Noble, have sponsors to talk about their Flagship Wireless iems. The focus Mystique Noble, does crazy stuff like taking custom molds of your ear and producing bespoke iems that are just for you and they also have like a ton of like crazy cool designs, and I’m also looking at these just on the front right now and I’m Very excited to see what the design looks like you may have heard about some of their Flagship headphones like the Ronin. These are something that you’re going to actually be able to buy, which is nice.

You know I love that there is a ton of competition in the wireless earphone space. Now I find when audio file companies try to do wireless headphones, they kind of tend to stumble in one place or another, where it’s like established brands that have been doing in the wireless space for a long time. Don’T what I’m hoping to see today is that Noble has dodged all those possible pitfalls and, given us a really really solid product. Let’S look at the features on the box on the front headphones case: wizard Qualcomm, aptx, adaptive and Bluetooth 5.2.

That’S great to see! Um! Now that Bluetooth 5.2 is becoming more and more ubiquitous, yes, they could be 5.3, whatever 5.2 is pretty good and we’re seeing more and more headphones coming out with the 5.2 standard. One thing that’s interesting about these is that they have a triple driver Arrangement, so one Dynamic driver, which is the usual kind of speaker, cone that you’re familiar with and then two balanced, armatures balanced armature is kind of like a speaker, but it’s like a wiggly stick. Instead of a wiggly cone, that’s really in depth! If you want uh to learn more about balanced armatures, we’ve done a video on techwiki about it. Multi-Driver wireless headphones are not totally brand new to the space, but they do tend to be more complex to manufacture and that can introduce a whole host of difficulties.

But why would you want more than one driver in your headphone when there’s lots of good headphones out there that just use a single driver well think about it? Like a speaker, you see a lot of speakers that you buy for your desktop or whatever will have multiple drivers. You’Ll often have like a woofer and then a tweeter. What that does is it allows for Better Sound reproduction across a wider Spectrum? You can apply the same kind of idea to a earphone by using a multiple Dynamic drivers or, in this case balanced armature.

So you can let that big, Dynamic driver. That’S in your headphone push all of those low bass notes with a lot of clarity and then let the balanced armatures handle some of the higher notes. Now this introduces extra complexity in the form of instead of tuning One driver.

You now have to tune three drivers. You have to make sure that they’re in sync, you have to make sure that they’re in Phase you have to make sure that they’re not overpowering one another which makes eq’ing more complex, as well as making requiring more complex circuitry. To balance out all of the signals that are being sent, but when done properly, the results can be very, very good. These have a 3D printed semi-custom housing with comfortable fit and a noble art, faceplate Suite. So we’re going to get one of those cool designs that Noble’s known for we have a metal charging case metal. They use a Qualcomm chipset, which gives you a lot of nice features, including aptx, adaptive for low latency, high quality audio, as well as true Wireless mirroring technology and their CVC noise canceling, for when you’re talking on the phone with people touch, controls and a wizard tune.

Sound signature, yes Wizards, they say: 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz, that’s good! That’S the whole hearing range and uh that kind of covers. What’S on the box, let’s uh take a look at what’s inside yep, it’s a manual before the money shot, we’re gon na get to the box, and here we have one pouch, a charging, cable one pieces and ear tips, three pairs. Oh, it seems a little redundant. I’M not gon na lie. I already have the charging case, but I guess if you want a pouch for a case for your case, then you’re in luck, um whoa, it’s plastic. Okay, that’s more than three pairs.

They lied to me like in a good way, though you heard it here first, when Noble lies, they only undersell it there’s a small, medium and large by the looks of it, of the double flange and of the normal side of the normal types of ear tips. I really love double flanger tips and not enough companies include them in the box uh they just for me. They just allow me to get a really great and really consistent seal that I can’t get from a lot of other headphones.

So it reduces the amount of times that I’m like fidgeting or adjusting them to make sure that they sound exactly right, which is awesome, because this is an audio focused headphone. And if it’s not gon na sound right all the time, then I don’t want none of it and a cable. We got a USB a to a USB C and it’s a very short cable.

I don’t know how I feel about short cables. I’Ve never once been like. Oh yes, thank thank God.

It’S only six inches, let’s take a look at these headphones, so this is the resin they’re very sparkly, and it doesn’t look like the top Down’s catching it. They seem like one solid piece like it’s not like. It’S a glued layer like there’s no seam here or anything. These are really really well constructed, I’m not sure if the resin is like actually printed into the housing or not, it must be. I can’t see any sort of seam. You can tell that it’s actually resin and not like just like um some sort of printing on the outside, because they’re not the exact same they’re, slight differences and they’re like wispiness man. These are gorgeous. This is the kind of um designs that you see in the IEM space, for, like audio files and stuff, like you see stuff from like Moon drop like the blessings and stuff like that, where they have like these really cool designs on them. A lot of the times things look pretty boring in the wireless headphone space, but these are absolutely stunning.

So this is a metal case, that’s for sure um. It doesn’t really feel like it’s, not it’s not like ridiculously heavy, despite the fact that it’s metal, it’s clear that they’re using a metal outer shell and then there’s a plastic inlay, It’s relatively compact, but as you can see, these are also relatively bulky. Like look at the depth of those, that’s a, I don’t know what the exact measurements are, but those are going to stick out, we’ll put them in my ears in a second to see um the case.

We have four LEDs to show the charging. I don’t know if they actually do anything else other than be charging. I’M not sure.

If there’s like another inside here, there’s a pairing button right there press that and they go into a pairing mode. You can tell by the blinking lights that they are looking to pair and also we’ll get a fit test, fit Impressions, I’m using the small double flange tips personally they fit in my ears. The best I mean like look at the size of the uh, the grill or the sound filter, that’s pretty big! If you’re somebody who struggles with even small ear tips, these just might not really be for you just because of the size of that. Just something to note: if you’re a smaller human, these could very well not fit, but as with any expensive audio gear, you should always be trying before you buy and Noble has a return window. I hope yeah the hinge. You can hear it grinding.

Okay, it’s got a good, but the action is just not there. You know it’s just a little grainy, but not about fidgeting. With these we’re about listening. The only fidget I want to be doing is when I’m listening to tunes that I’m going to do. You know. Okay, that’s what I want.

Let’S get her in there yeah. These are kind of chonkers um. If you’re somebody who wants to sleep with headphones in these are not going to be for you, oh my God, it’s very loud uh when it gives you the ambient listening on it’s like Full Tilt, I’m sure that they can fix that.

But, oh my god. So, let’s listen to some good songs, um First Impressions is that boy do these have bass like these have bass in a good way a lot of times when headphones, try to do like really bass heavy stuff, they end up sounding bloated and it overpowers the mids And it just sounds like a mess. These are providing a ton of bass, but it’s like clean and calculated.

It sounds really good and it doesn’t subtract from how much fun it is to have all of that extra bass, and also I’m surprised by The Sound Stage here. Uh, actually a lot of the times. That’S the biggest weakness of earbuds is that they just can’t produce a wide feeling Sound Stage.

The main Melody of the guitar in Doritos and Fritos by 100 gex is basically like all of the screw-up noises from Guitar Hero and the way that they’re placed around the mix is like super super noticeable and makes it really really fun to listen to and then, Like the base is just like, they also tend to be actually surprisingly detailed in the high end too, which is great, but not in a way that makes it like really harsh, like um on the new jpeg Mafia and Danny Brown. Album everything’s like mixed, like just like Full Tilt like Max wall of sound kind of stuff, and it makes these like and it can be kind of overbearing. Things are a little shouty in the higher end and even kind of shrill, because there’s a ton of distortion and glitches in these beats and that really helps them succeed in their focus of being like an audiophile here, but more than a lifestyle earbud.

And what do they mean by that? Well, these aren’t the most feature Rich. These don’t have any active noise canceling. They do still have a microphone, they do take calls you can do all that stuff and they have an app which we’ll take a look at in just a moment and with those microphones they allow you to have an ambient mode, so you can listen through. So, even though you’re getting a really really solid seal and blocking out a lot of the world, you can still always just switch these on for convenience, which is great if you’re like a Commuter or you’re in an airport waiting for announcements, or you just want to Talk to somebody who’s having to like be like, but I do wish that it didn’t take three seconds for the transparency mode to activate, but I think we can add to that in the app only one way to find out um. So here’s the noble focus, app um ambient mode, is on. Oh, it’s sweet.

So if you’re in the app already, I guess you can turn it on and off pretty quick in the app we have an EQ. We have a bunch of presets classic pop Jazz rap folk and default listening to them right now. They kind of do what you expect pop adds a little bit more Sizzle to the top to the high end and a little bit more Bass, uh, but they’re. All pretty subtle and another thing is that you can do a personalized EQ. So what they do is they play beeps at various different frequencies, and you say whether or not you could hear them and how many of them that you had heard and then they’ll adjust the levels in the 10 band EQ accordingly, based on your performance in this Listening test, but if you think you know better than that, and you might, I’ve never had the best experience with these kind of sound tests they’re. Never quite there. You do have access to a full 10 band EQ, which is nice. Actually, this app is pretty slick. There’S everything that I need not a whole lot of what I don’t oh and there we go. We can adjust the controls for our right and left headphones, just the triple and double clicks. So that means that we can’t adjust for our voice assistant, which is one of the holds, nor can we adjust the ambient mode, which is a little disappointing. I just really wish that um every app would just allow me to customize every function like I don’t know why not at some point they had to program it.

So just let me do it as well. These are just in-app settings and then you can also I’d like that too. They made it simple and obvious to update the firmware. It’S just right.

There you don’t have to like go, do like a Settings app, it’s not hidden because like if they have improvements to give to the functionality, you should be able to get them really easily. That is definitely one of the better apps that I have used it’s funny. When you see other brands that are a lot bigger than noble making substantially worse apps, so those are my sound Impressions, but we have Labs data too. So we put this in a fancy little head and we took some measurements and, as you can see, there’s a lot of bass. Um, a solid, like 10 DB, boost across basically all the way up to a 300 Hertz, where I guess it gets down more to like two or three DB. That’S a lot of bass, but it’s just so consistent across the whole spectrum, and it sounds so good and it’s so fun. You might find that if you’re not like a huge bass head, you’d want to dial it back. Luckily, you can do that with their EQ and then you can see throughout the mids it’s very close to the Target. So you shouldn’t expect this headphone to come across as like shouty or overbearing um and then in the treble, there’s no considerable worrisome Peaks. So nothing’s gon na be super shrill.

However, if you do want to adjust these to be closer to our Target, we actually have some settings for you in the EQ that uh are gon na help. It better match the Target that we have. Why would you want it to match the Target that we have? Well? Basically, the idea of the headphone Target is that it’s what most people are going to find agreeable and what they will like everyone’s ears are different. Everyone’S preferences are different, so it’s worth trying to customize and spending a little bit of time in the EQ to make sure that these nice headphones sound exactly the way that you want them, you spent the money on them, make them work for you.

This is a mic test of the noble Focus, Mystique we’re in the office right now. You can hear some typing in the background. Maybe some AC? How does it sound? One thing I noticed was that I don’t think that these actually support multi-point connection, which is really disappointing because they support Bluetooth 5.2. What’S the deal with that, oh we forgot to talk about battery life and charging with it um.

So you get seven and a half hours with these headphones by themselves and an additional four charges in the case, which means that you get a total of 37 hours between both the headphones and the case. Also, if you were hoping for like any sort of Ip rating, they don’t have that, but they do. They do say that you can use it for exercising, though they don’t recommend submerging it. I never recommend submerging headphones, even if they are IP rated. That just seems silly, so they have Qualcomm adaptive, which means that they have lower latency, but they don’t have Qualcomm adaptive low latency. So don’t expect these to be ideal for playing like music games on the go you’ll still have to like. Maybe make some adjustments in the settings for delaying stuff, but man that music sounds so good on them.

How much will these set you back um well about 359, which puts them on the pricier end of the spectrum, but audio quality is important to you. Wireless convenience! Hey, that’s only sixty dollars per driver, that’s pretty good right now! This is a sponsor short circuit. So I can’t give you a purchase recommendation, but I can recommend that you go check these out in the link below if you are interested in learning more about them. Thanks to Noble audio for sponsoring this and for making a a fair, just a gorgeous just a gorgeous pair of headphones. Look at that they’re! So pretty .